Kid + Igloo + Book

Here’s a new take on curling up with a favorite book on a snowy day: build an igloo. I love this picture beyond reckoning. It’s a fourth-grader happily nestled in a snow fort, reading Barbara O’Connor’s delightful How to Steal a Dog, oblivious to the outside world. (The reader’s mom sent the photo to Ms. O’Connor after a school author visit.)
Isn’t that what a great book does? Absorb you so deeply you aren’t aware of anything around you but the world of the story? Susan Cooper captured that absorption perfectly in Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children (p. 24, if you want to know):

Watch the child reading a book: really reading, totally caught up in the world into which the words on the page have transported him…. He is sprawled or curled or propped in some inelegant position, face concentrated and intent, motionless; he isn’t with you any more. He doesn’t hear you when you call; he doesn’t notice that the sun has set and that he should turn on the light. He’s away out there with the author, in wonderland.

Fourth-grader, cozy in igloo, reads Barbara O'Connor's HOW TO STEAL A DOG. Photo credit: Katarina Krek.

*From an article in PW Shelftalker